How can hundreds and even thousands of years of history, which includes entire civilizations, discoveries and characters, so confidently be explained? Not all of it could have happened the way it’s being taught to modern society, right?
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I mean if you wanna be pedantic about it, you really *can’t* know for sure. We could just decide to distrust everything and believe that all history is fake.
But generally, there are records of things happening. In more recent history, we have written records and that sort of thing. If multiple people wrote about a thing happening, it probably happened. Nobody photographed the Revolutionary War, but we can pretty confidently conclude that it wasn’t a big lie, since there are loads of records of it having happened, from written war strategies to correspondence between units to journal entries from soldiers and civilians who were near the combat. This stuff usually comes with certain physical evidence of things having happened—in the case of the Revolution, we have muskets and musket balls, old uniforms, bayonets, swords, and other evidence that a war took place.
Ancient artifacts and Neolithic monuments can be traced through time using carbon dating and similar techniques, so we can tell roughly how old they are. Getting *way* back, it becomes hard to determine conclusively what certain objects or monuments were for (Stonehenge, for example). In those cases, historians and scientists of all sorts will theorize about possible applications for the things, and present evidence backing up their theories. Stonehenge, for instance, is theorized to have been either a mass burial ground or some astronomy-related contraption—maybe both. We’re not totally sure about these things, but large numbers of Neolithic human bones found by the site as well as certain mathematical specifications that line up with certain celestial cycles have led experts to believe that either or both of these theories could be correct.
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